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III.
I BELIEVE IN GOD THE FATHER,
ALMIGHTY, MAKER OF HEAVEN
AND EARTH.
God that made the world and all things therein...made
of one every nation of men...that they should seek God, if
haply they might feel after Him and find Him, though He is
not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move
and have our being.
ACTS xvii. 24—28.
To us
there is one God, the Father, of Whom are all
things, and we unto Him.
1 COR. viii. 6.
God is
spirit.
JOHN iv. 24.
God is
light.
1 JOHN i. 5.
God is
love.
1 JOHN iv. 8, 16.
Our God
is a consuming fire.
DEUT. iv. 24.; HEBR. xii. 29.
WE have spoken of Faith which is the power
of life, and of the Creed which sets be-
fore us the object of our Christian Faith. The
Apostles' Creed is, as we have seen, personal
and historical. It offers to us a God on Whom
we can throw ourselves for guidance and support,
and not a series of abstract propositions which
we must hold as true. It enables us to form a
conception of His nature from the record of what
He has done, as Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier,
a conception which as it is brought to us through
life gains in fulness and clearness as our know-
ledge of life is enlarged either by our individual
experience, or by the accumulated experience of
mankind.
The Apostles' Creed, I repeat, shews God to
us, the One God, as our Creator, Redeemer, Sanc-
tifier, and we acknowledge under each relation
what He has done, is doing and will do for us,
that so we may gain strength and wisdom for
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32
Belief in God.
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the accomplishment of our own duty to Him, to
our neighbour and to ourselves. Each of the
main aspects of this threefold divine work will
come under notice in due order. We have now to
consider the first article in which our Faith finds
expression for its confidence: I believe in God,
the Father, Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth ,
words which bear witness to the highest power
and the true end of man; words which include
all that is made plainer to us by the slow un-
folding of the divine purpose; words which fix
for ever our fellowship with God, our fellowship
one with another, our fellowship, I will venture
to say, with all the works of God.
I believe in God . To say this is
to confess
that there is something greater than our minds,
greater than our hearts, to which we can aspire
with love answering to love: something which
thought can touch, so to speak, but neither prove
nor measure, which affection can reach after and
yet not everywhere embrace.
I believe in God . To say this is
to confess
that there is, in spite of every unpunished sin,
every fruitless sorrow (as we judge), one purpose
of victorious righteousness being fulfilled about
us and in us, one purpose able to reconcile justice
and mercy in the complete accomplishment of
the destiny of creation.
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Belief in God.
33
I believe in God . To say this is to
confess
that we are not alone, ourselves, our families, our
nation, our race, and yet that we are alone: not
alone because we are bound to countless forms
of finite being visible and invisible, alone, indi-
vidually alone, because the full harmony of the
universe depends upon the presence in due
measure of all the parts, even of that feeblest
part, which is inaudible it may be to our ears.
I believe in God . To say this is to
confess
that we stand each as children face to face with
Him Whom the heaven of heavens cannot con-
tain: to confess that the preservation of the
world depends on Him Who made it: to confess
that there is a unity of being of which there is
one source and one end, that there is, in the
words of St Paul, one God, the Father, of Whom
are all things and we unto Him .
These are the thoughts which we have to
seek to bring into our life, thoughts of the un-
searchable Majesty, and the unfailing Providence
of God, of the endless variety and supreme unity
of His creation, thoughts which at once pass into
prayers. Some one has spoken of 'the knees of
the soul.' So may we bend now on 'the knees
of our souls,' as we meditate very shortly on each
clause in the first Article of our Faith.
I believe in God . The declaration of
our de-
W. H.
F.
3
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Belief in
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pendence is in harmony with all that our reason
can establish, but it does not depend upon our
reason. No argument which we can draw either
from the consideration of ourselves or from the
consideration of the world can carry us to the
conclusion in which alone we find strength and
rest. The God Whom the soul sees dimly and
to Whom it turns as the flower turns to the
sun is greater than His works shew Him, greater
than our minds can measure. It is true
that every argument from design and from con-
science, from being which underlies phenomena
and from being which underlies thought, suggests
to us, as we are able to follow the indications,
something more- as to the nature and working of
Him after Whom our whole manhood feels and
in Whom it can repose; but such arguments
illuminate the conception and do not create it
or prove its truth. The idea of God, the
idea of One who is described most completely
as 'Spirit,' 'Light,' 'Love,' 'Fire,' of absolute
righteousness and power and mercy, answers to
the maturity of man's growth, as light answers
to the eye. We were made to recognise Him,
and He has made Himself known.
So we go on a step further. I believe ,
we
say, in God, the Father . In this connexion the
title Father is a gift of the Gospel. The
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God the Father.
35
oldest Greek poets spoke of Zeus as 'the father
of gods and men' under the imagery of patri-
archal life, and they made Him like to them-
selves. Philosophers spoke of the Father
of the universe, recognising something more than
an arbitrary connexion between the Creator and
the Creation, but they added that "it is hard to
gain a knowledge of Him and impossible to com-
municate it to the world." The Hebrew
Prophets spoke of the Lord as the Father
of Israel, forming and disciplining the chosen
people with a wise and tender love. But Christ
first added the title 'my Father' to that of
'our Father.' It is through the revela-
tion of the Son that we can find each our
personal fellowship with a Father in heaven.
And at the same time it is through the revela-
tion of the Son that the idea of Fatherhood is
shewn to lie in the very Nature of the Godhead
itself. In the Life and Death of Christ
there is a revelation unexhausted and inex-
haustible of the Father, His Father and our
Father. The answer to the prayer ' Shew us the
Father, ' which is ever rising in some form or
other to the disciple's lips, will be to the end of
time: 'Have I —I, the Son of Man, the Son of
God— been so long time with you and dost thou
not know Me? ' hast thou not yet read the lesson
3-2
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God All-sovereign.
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of a life laid down that it might be taken up
again, of death conquered, of heaven entered and
laid open ? hast thou not found in this manifesta-
tion of God's will and love and power, Him in
Whom faith gains a distinct object, and affection
the fulness of a devout service?
Thus our personal want is satisfied. We see
'the Father' in the record of Christ's personal
life wrought out under the conditions of human
effort and suffering. But we are men and among
men. We are citizens. We are children and
parents. We share a life wider than our own.
Looking to these facts, full of solemn and un-
utterable mysteries, we say: I believe in God, the
Father, Almighty , or rather if we may endeavour
to express the force of the original term. All-
sovereign . For the title is not descriptive
of abstract power but of exercised dominion.
It is used in the Greek version of the Old
Testament to represent what stands in our
English Bible as 'the Lord of hosts,' the King
Who sways by His will the course of all finite
being. When then we say, I believe in God, the
Father, Almighty , we confess that the Father to
Whom the heart of His children can turn in
trustful confidence is the Ruler of the world, the
Ruler of the worlds. This is a faith which
it is alike difficult to grasp and impossible to
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God All-sovereign. 37
surrender. We cannot give up the belief that
there is a purpose and an order and an end in
what often seem the blind tumults of nations.
We cannot give it up, and yet ' here and here'
perhaps we cannot justify it. We may re-
joice then that the one Creed of our Baptism
lifts up our thoughts to a higher level: that
it extends the scene on which the issues of life
are played out: that it places all that we see in
connexion with the eternal. Scripture indeed
does not veil the darknesses of life while it reveals
the light. It speaks most significantly of powers
of evil as 'world-sovereign,' but none the less
it proclaims without one note of hesitancy that
God is 'All-sovereign.' The end is not
here, and it is not yet. Meanwhile we can hold
our faith and say in spite of tyrannies which
crush for ages the powers of nations, of ambitions
which squander them with prodigal selfishness,
of passions which divide and neutralise them:
'I look further than my present sight reaches.
' I carry forward my hope to an order where this
'order will find its consummation. I appeal to
'the tribunal of a sovereign Judge, whose will
'is right and whose will must prevail: I believe
'in God the Father, Almighty. '
The earliest Western Creed added no more.
This was the whole of the first article. It
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God the Maker of heaven and earth.
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seemed enough to acknowledge God's dealings
with the individual soul and with the world, as
Father and Ruler. But at a later time a clause was
borrowed from the East which completes our con-
fession and we were taught to say: I believe in
God the Father, Almighty, Maker of heaven and
earth .
The addition was not without a weighty
purpose. This acknowledgment of God as the
Creator of things visible and invisible brings with
it many deep and helpful thoughts. It reminds
us that as all that is came into existence by the
will and power of God, so it is sustained by Him
alone ; for the fact of creation involves the necessity
of preservation, of unfolding. It reminds
us that the greatest and least objects by which
we are surrounded, the Sun in its glory and the
stars in their countless multitude : mountains and
all hills: fruitful trees and all cedars: beasts
and all cattle: worms and feathered fowls were
made by Him who made us, and that they there-
fore fill a place in His vast counsel of love, and
minister to His glory. It reminds us of
the truth, which others are beginning to tell us
with stern reproaches, that we cannot separate
ourselves from the material world of which we are
a part; but in doing so it does not mockingly
thrust m'an down to the level of the earth, but
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The range of belief in God. 39
it offers to him the hope that the earth shall share
the glory of his redemption.
So the first article of our Creed reaches its
amplest range. We confess that the God who is
the soul's necessity has been revealed to us in
Christ as the Father, is indicated by history as
All-sovereign, is declared by nature as Maker of
heaven and earth. Reaching out to these realities
of life, pondering our connexion with the world,
with humanity, with God, striving to give fuller
distinctness to that which we apprehend vaguely,
labouring now and again to bring the little details
and difficulties of duty into the light of our
confession, we say one to another I and I and I
believe in God the Father, Almighty, Maker of
heaven and earth .
We say so and Christ's words sound in our
ears Do ye now believe? It is indeed the question
of all questions. For, as I said before, our belief
in God is not a matter of speculation or of
customary form, of light controversy or hasty
speech. The name, the thought of God may well
fill us with wordless awe. He of Whom we
speak is so near and yet so infinitely unapproach-
able, so ' questionable' and yet so past finding out,
that every confession seems to claim as its
sequel a space of silent adoration. It is
otherwise with the fashionable idols of man's
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III.
Eccles. v.
1, 2.
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A living God.
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making. But for us God cannot be simply the
august symbol of the authority with which we
invest a varying collection of principles and laws:
the ideal centre to which we can bring together
the choice offerings of culture and art: the
postulate or the necessary conclusion of human
reason, which requires that which is eternal be-
neath the shows of time. Not so: taught
by our Creed we look to One Who rules with that
freedom which is perfect justice: for One Whom
we can serve with the devotion of our whole nature
and Who welcomes our service: for One Who
quickens, guides, inspires the individual soul with
the influence of a real fellowship, love calling out
and answering love. He in us that we may be
enabled to fulfil our part in the conflicts of a
chequered life, we in Him that we may rise in
faith to the calmness of that 'rest of God' which
is work without toil.
Do ye now believe? It is a question which
concerns the present even more than the past.
It is not enough to hold that God did great
things for our fathers: not enough to pride our-
selves on the inheritance of victories of faith : not
enough to build the sepulchres of those who were
martyred by men unwilling in their day of trial
as we may be in our own to hear new voices of a
living God. Our duty is to see whether God is
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The apparent absence of God. 41
with us. Whether we expect great things from
Him. Whether we do not practically place Him
far off, forgetting that if He is , He is about us,
speaking to us words which have not been heard
before, guiding us to paths on which earlier gene-
rations have not been able to enter. There
is, most terrible thought, a practical atheism, or-
thodox in language and reverent in bearing, which
can enter a Christian Church and charm the con-
science to rest with shadowy traditions, an atheism
which grows insensibly within us if we separate
what cannot be separated with impunity, the
secular from the divine, the past and the future
from the present, earth from heaven, the things of
Caesar from the things of God.
Do ye now believe? We read of the conflicts
of nations and take account of what seem to be
the motives, selfish and unworthy, of those who
direct them : we go into the highways of our cities
and measure in the idle loungers the waste of
energy, physical, moral, spiritual, enough to arm a
new and nobler Crusade: we look into our own
hearts and see with something of startled surprise
how small a place is occupied by the thought
of God, while we are confident in the strength
which He has lent, and sanguine with the hope
which He has inspired: and we pause perhaps
before we make reply.
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The presence of God.
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If we do pause let us thank God that He has
again called us to Himself. By that arrested
thought He makes known that He is waiting
to teach us: waiting to teach us in the silence of
our heart's watches, in the distractions of our
business, through the temptations which lead us
to self-indulgence and self-assertion, which per-
suade us to appeal to low impulses and to seek
easy successes, which embolden us to put aside
fresh truths because they will not conveniently
fit into the scheme of the world which we have
made. Even so let us now thank God,
Who is waiting to teach us that we may confess
more intelligently and more actively the source
from which we came and the end for which we
were made ; waiting to teach us that our lives may
witness by the power of their influence and the
singleness of their aim that for us there is one
God, the Father, of Whom are all things and we
unto Him .
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